


Judgement Day

by emeraldarrows



Category: The Gallant Men
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Dark, Gen, Heavy Angst, Homecoming, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Tragedy, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-21 00:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9522266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emeraldarrows/pseuds/emeraldarrows
Summary: The burden of command weighs heavy in the midst of war and in the years beyond.





	1. Chapter 1

_"No one but night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me in this windy place." - Edna St. Vincent Millay_

At ten o'clock it's raining when he sends the men out on a routine patrol, something they've done a hundred times. There's always a risk, he knows this, but he's told himself that it isn't today, it isn't his men. The dead will only be the enemy, or strangers that he hasn't gotten to know yet. It won't be a man he calls by his first name. It won't be a friend.

At eleven o'clock he hears the man's voice over the radio, telling him where they are, how things are going. He orders them to hold the hill, to hold back the Germans. Twenty minutes later the radio falls silent and he waits, fingers curled around the lifeless machine, waiting, waiting for static, for a familiar voice, for an answer. But the silence continues unbroken.

At one o'clock he sends out another patrol, to search for those missing. They move cautiously, each step searching for mines, for a sniper's bullet. It takes an hour to find the location they last radioed in from, and despite his hopes they find it as he already expected - deserted.

At two o'clock they find survivors, broken and bleeding men, some barely alive, barely conscious, but walking, stumbling down the road like machines. The rest are corpses, lying like broken dolls. One man is sitting in the road, blood streaming from a head wound. He stares off into space, into a depth only he can see as he rocks a lifeless body in his arms, a mangled form of bones and tattered skin who in life was his best friend. The medics work from man to man, and even he holds down on wounds, ties bandages around them. After all isn't it the least he can do since he sent them out to die?

At three o'clock they find the missing man, all that's left of him after the German shot three ounces of lead through him. The man is lying still, face down in the mud, body twisted and torn, one arm outstretched toward the enemy lines as if in a final plea for mercy. He puts his hand down on the uniform and feels the wetness, like a canteen spilled on the fabric, soaking it through. Only the liquid coating the jacket is red and still warm.

At five o'clock he stands by his desk holding the dogtags and typing up the report, cold, sterile words on paper that tell how a man died, but not how he lived. And it never says whether or not he could have changed it - that finding him faster might have saved his life, or what his life might have been if he'd only called them down off that hill.

At six o'clock he pours a glass of alcohol and drinks a silent toast to the man. When the amber liquid only fills a fourth of the glass his vision starts to blur and he even thinks he sees him, standing across from him, helmet in hand, a ready smile on his face. But it's only a ghost.

At nine o'clock he finally falls asleep, a sleep filled with tangled dreams and screams he's never heard yet somehow hears constantly in his mind. He sees the face of the dead man, so vividly he knows that it must just be a dream. There must be something, some sense to it all that doesn't require that every good man be sacrificed. For his sanity he must be allowed to spare one, to save his friend.

But when morning comes it isn't a dream but another day.

He's sitting beside the grave, hand curled against the stone, fingers digging into the name that represents a soldier, a living man he sent out who never came back, a man he respected, who was his friend.

The woman putting flowers on the grave next to him looks over and asks about the man buried here, the person behind the name, beneath the stone.

"He died ten years ago." He says quietly. "I killed him."

It's ten o'clock and it's raining.


	2. Chapter 2

_"On pillar'd brass shall tell their praise; shall tell when cold neglect is dead. These for their country fought and bled." - Philip Freneau_

I suppose in war it's easy to forget what you once were and think of yourself as only a soldier.

Me, I was a photographer before that. Not a newspaper photographer and not famous or anything, but I took pictures of people for a living and I like to think I was good at it. Over time you start to notice things in a photograph, tiny details you might never see just by glancing at a person's face, things like laugh lines or worry bracketing their mouth. And then you get so used to looking for it in photographs that you start seeing the people around you in a new and different light.

Take the men of the company I served in, for example. I was in the Italian Campaign in WWII. I suppose that means little to the young, and even some older people may give a faint nod or question what we did there. I don't suppose it's as well remembered as D-day or the like, but among veterans of that campaign it's a quiet code, a passed word _I served in Italy_ and they nod knowingly, eyes tipping in silent salute to another survivor.

I don't suppose war is gentle or kind in any place but it seemed worse in Italy, with miles of open land crawling with the faceless enemy and no place to hide, with baking sun and nothing but a world of rain and mud. None of us were ever truly clean or free of filth all those months, and even the blood stayed caked into your hands, the gunpowder leaving a residue on your skin no amount of scrubbing could completely erase.

Saunders is the name. I served with hundreds of other men, some I never met, some of whom were only a face, a name, a dogtag clenched in the Captain's hand. I was drafted, like most of the others, and one day in September we ran onto a beach called Salerno.

Some of us made it. Most of us didn't.

Strangely enough I remember eight men better than all the rest, whether I actually knew them so well because they were my friends, or whether because we ate and drank and slept side by side under conditions you can't imagine, I'll never know. Only those eight faces stand out in my mind, frozen young and immortal within the only photograph taken of my company.

The first face was Conley Wright, war correspondent and voice of reason. He was older than the other men, and it was a while before I understood why an obviously exempt man would volunteer to enter one of the bloodiest places of this war.

The first time I understood was when I saw him hunched over his typewriter after a particularly bloody day, pounding on the keys as if taking out his anger. And when I read the words he wrote I understood, knew why he was there.

He suffered and bled that ink all over the page for the people back home, the ones who'd never see anything of the war but newsreels and movies, the women who didn't want to think about their husbands and sweethearts over there, the little kids who didn't understand why Daddy was gone and never coming home. He showed them images, photographs wrapped within words, a hundred days and a dozen ordinary men, pictures of why they fought, and who they were, from the wedding band wrapped around the lifeless hand of a private to the anguish in an officer's face as he realized it was his orders the man had obeyed last. He gave some meaning to flag-draped coffins and cold medals in place of living arms wrapped around their family and warm kisses against their lips every time he mentioned the laughter of a child running through a town we'd liberated from the Nazis, or the soldiers using their furlough to rebuild that town, to give it a school and a church for future generations.

Looking back, I don't know how Conley bore it. He never complained, not even when he carried the gun of the limping soldier beside him, or supported a stretcher, or held down on an artery while waiting for a medic who'd already been killed. He offered words of comfort to dying men like a chaplain, threw his anger into words against the enemy with as much power as the bullets the rest of the men fired. A weaponless writer who gave so much to a weary group of men.

Then there was Gibson, towheaded and soft-spoken, barely old enough to shave. He was just a kid and I guess we all felt protective of him. Smart as a whip, too. You should have seen him operate his radio in the midst of bombings that shook the ground, him huddled in a trench shouting over the noise, calling for help to get us out. There's many of us that wouldn't have lasted the war if not for that kid.

And Lucavich and Hansen, inseparable, seldom seen without the other. Oh, they fought like all friends do, but never for long. Joking constantly, both of them, but fine soldiers when the chips were down.

Lt. Kimbo, a quiet man with a hidden thunder. I remember him as a man of many layers, caught in the middle of a conflict. Most of all I remember his devotion to his men. He'd risk life, limb, even the war to save a single one of them. Put him at odds with the Captain at times, but he never sacrificed anyone.

Sgt. McKenna, Irish through and through and proud of it. He projected that mixed image of the best of non-coms, tough as leather with a twinkle in his eye that spoke of a softer side. I still see him some nights, standing in a little restaurant somewhere, trying to coax "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" out of D'Angelo and his guitar.

Ah, yes, Pete D'Angelo. Italian, so he took the war personally. An odd sort of man, truth be told. I wouldn't have bet ten cents that he'd survive the war the first time I set eyes on him. 

Out there, in the war, he was like a wall, hard, firm. I heard he killed more Germans than most of us saw. I think the man was born in a pool hall judging from the way he played cards and dice, smooth, slick. Half the men owed him the shirt off their backs and everything else besides. Not that he cheated, mind you, he was just that good. He chased women like they were about to go extinct and could sing the roughest blues you've ever heard.

And yet, you took him away from the smoke and the blood, and put him in a town and D'Angelo turned into an angel. The kids loved him to pieces, even if he was out of bubblegum. They'd just climb up on his knees or sit in front and listen to him sing the softest lullabies and love songs you've ever heard, all in Italian so they understood. It was like a depth buried beneath the surface that was hard to scratch.

He had a picture in his pocket of a woman. He found it during a battle in which nobody thought they'd survive. D'Angelo carried her picture over his heart. He didn't know her but it didn't matter. They all needed something to cling to and it was like a lucky charm to him, proof he survived odds he wouldn't have bet on.

The commander was Captain Benedict. A young man, never seen a day of battle or a dead man until Salerno, far younger than his lieutenant or sargeant. But after that day he stepped into his role like he was born to command. He was a good man, hard and unfair though he seemed, and a lot of weight rested on his shoulders. Too much, I thought at times.

I can still recall the horrible empty look in his eyes any time a man fell, every time he broke off a dogtag and stood, head bent over it, staring at the cold metal resting in his palm. He never showed regret, not in front of the men. He was their commander, after all. But he hurt, deep inside, too deep to heal with medicine or bandages, cutting into him like shrapnel.

And I remember one day most of all, a single incident that stands out above all the rest.

We'd had a week of furlough in a sleepy little town, days of merciful silence in place of the constant shelling still ringing in our ears, quiet moments of D'Angelo singing to the townspeople, talking quietly to a girl who spoke broken English and smiled like the sunrise.

And then the Germans came, so quickly, so suddenly we barely had time to scramble for weapons. They barricaded themselves into the church, that beautiful, newly-built church, along with a handful of hostages.

We crouched behind some rubble across the street, waiting and watching for them to make their move, firing high and praying we didn't hit one of the townspeople. We killed some Germans who tried to make it out the back. A couple of the hostages managed to escape, and I saw Lucavich and Hansen hurrying them behind the lines to safety.

After a while we saw a movement in the doorway, and Captain Benedict hissed "Hold your fire" as we held our breath to see what would happen.

It was a German, grenade - pin still in - in one hand, the other holding a gun smashed into the small of the back of the frightened girl in front of him. And, God help me, I recognized her, the pretty girl who'd listened enraptured to D'Angelo singing, who'd spoken of her dreams following the war.

D'Angelo hesitated, only a second, but long enough for the German to pull the pin on the grenade and draw his arm back.

Captain Benedict fired, hitting the German in the shoulder below the grenade, enough to make him lose his grip, dropping the grenade back on himself in the instant before it exploded.

I couldn't look, I just couldn't. I'd seen too many men die already. Instead I stole a glimpse of Captain Benedict's face and wished I hadn't, nausea clawing at the back of my throat. He looked like a walking dead man, face chalk white, eyes lifeless and frozen, mouth set in grim horror and resignation. For an instant I didn't understand, and then it dawned, like the moment you hold a black-rimmed telegram in your hands and know the significance, what he'd done, and what had happened.

I heard D'Angelo yell. Only it wasn't a yell, more like a raw scream, and it wasn't in English, but Italian, words jumbled together, as he lunged forward. Lt. Kimbro tried to pull him back but lost his grip and D'Angelo half ran, half staggered forward, dropping to his knees beside the bloodied body of the girl.

And I knew what had happened. In that instant, Captain Benedict had made a decision no man should have to make. A girl's life, a civilian, against his entire squad. He knew, by shooting the German, by that grenade falling downwards like a wounded bird from the sky, that there wouldn't be enough time for the girl to scramble out of the way.

He'd known that it was her life or his men, and he'd fired. I wanted to throw up, to scream in rage like D'Angelo. And somewhere in front of us, echoing like a thousand drums, a million war cries, I heard D'Angelo still yelling, Italian meaningless to us, voice hoarse and raw. His arms were wrapped around the dead girl, holding her against him, rocking her as he screamed at Captain Benedict. And Captain Benedict said nothing.

After a while he stopped screaming, buried his face against the girl, and sobbed. None of us moved at first, too sick, too angry, too...we couldn't even identify what most of us felt. Finally Conley got up, walked over to him, knelt beside him, and put a hand on his shoulder. I think he was crying, too.

Some villagers came eventually, and took the girl's body away for burial. Conley got D'Angelo to his feet and we went back in silence.

We moved to another town the next day, and sometime in the midst of the battle I caught a round in the knee from a German machine gun and my war was over.

I went home, stiff leg and all, settled back into photography, met the baby born while I'd been away. I've had a good life.

I never did hear what happened to some of the men in the squad. A few are gone now, I expect, and some never made it through the war. Conley did, though, returning to a desk job with his battered old typewriter. He cherished that hunk of metal the rest of his life.

And D'Angelo, the soldier I wouldn't have given ten cents on that he'd survive the war? He caught a bullet an inch from the heart in one of the last battles. They nearly lost him on the way back, too much blood gone, too bad a wound, and the lack of sleep and not enough food catching up on him, but he hung on and they managed to get the bullet out, and send him back to a field hospital to die. After a while they stopped waiting to bury him and started waiting for him to be up and around.

He wasn't quite the same after the war. He'd lost a lot of friends, seen too much. But he pulled himself up out of the filth and blood of the war and started over. Last I heard he'd settled down, married to an Italian girl he met at the end of the war, and the father of a little girl. I saw her once, with his eyes in her face, but different...dancing and bright, as his were before Salerno and all the other days.

I don't know what happened to Captain Benedict. I hope he survived the war, that he found some peace finally, some forgiveness for that day and the others like it, and that he found something somewhere that took that look out of his eyes.

I wish I knew for certain.


	3. Chapter 3

_"We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped."-Harriet Tubman_

They spend the last five days of the war in a mud-splattered foxhole in an unnamed field that the veterans of the last war would have called no man's land, with a broken radio and not enough ammunition to hold their position half that time. There's only three of his men and Conley left and they haven't had a square meal or a full night's sleep in longer than he can remember. They're worn to the bone and pushed beyond the point of endurance and he finds himself strangely hardened to it all, no longer able to even flinch as the bullets strike closer or bother to wipe his hands clean of the grime that stains them.

Sometime in the middle of the second day D'Angelo tries to heave a grenade into the bunker and he watches with the resigned detachment of a commander who has already sent too many men to their deaths as the soldier falls. Lucavich drags him back and Conley tears aside his uniform. It's a bad wound, with the bullet resting against his heart, and a single hard jolt will drive it deeper, rupturing the fragile organ. There isn't a chance in the world and his first thought is a fleeting hope that Conley's meager grasp of Italian will be enough to see them through the next town.

He hears Gibson shouting his name, hands already slick with D'Angelo's blood, and he drops his eyes to the man's face, the chalky white of his skin beneath the grime. Gibson's eyes beg him and he realizes with a sense of shock that he hadn't even thought of him as one of his men dying, as D'Angelo who crawled onto Salerno with him, but only as an interpreter, like he'd been angered over the loss of the radio, a piece of equipment and not a human being.

There's no hope and they all know it but he orders the retreat anyway, and puts his own hands over the wound as they carry D'Angelo between them as gently as they can. The blood spurts between his fingers and he thinks vauguely that it would have made him sick just a few short years ago when he was a young man and not so callous. A college education and a war and he still can't remember exactly how much blood the human body contains but he knows that at least half of it must be on his clothes, far too much with every step they take.

Somehow, he'll never know how, D'Angelo is still breathing when they reach the hospital, rattles of air deep in his throat. The doctors go to work on him and he gives his own blood to help replace some of what's been lost. It's a habit by now, opening veins for each other until the blood or the life runs dry into the mud of Italy.

None of them expect D'Angelo to live. They've seen enough dying soldiers to recognize the clammy grasp on the men who can measure what's left of their lives in a handful of gasps, but the others are comforted by the knowledge that they tried, that they carried a dying man six miles and held the life in as long as they could. They look in on him one last time, not speaking, only looking at him, before slipping away.

Three days later the war is over.

He gets his discharge papers shortly after, crisp white and cold between his fingertips, sterile words releasing him from all that's happened as if it never existed, and returning him to who he was before. He enters the office a captain and leaves a civilian, broken off from the orders and salutes, letters and papers of the day before, free to return home like a bird who's lived too long in a cage and forgotten how to survive on his own.

America is strange to him. It's too quiet without the sound of bombs and he can't explain why the undamaged buildings seem strange to him. Here everyone speaks his language, from the girl who smiles at him and he averts his eyes, to the music on the radio, shrieking horns that hurt his ears and makes him long for the quiet sound of a guitar or an old victrola whispering an Italian melody. There's no need for an interpreter but he can't seem to read anymore, starting countless books and never reaching the second chapter. The words feel trivial, running blindly off the pages like blood dripping from his fingertips as he holds down on D'Angelo's artery and feels the pulse flickering beneath his own, blurred, a memory buried beneath the weight of others.

He dates a few girls, one date each and nothing more. None of them are comfortable around his silence and the moments when his gaze wanders into the past and his ears fill with the screams of the dying and wounded instead of the melody the band is playing. In those moments he forgets the girl in his arms, the one who smells of Evening In Paris and rustles in satin, and his hands grasp rough uniform as he clings to an injured man and watches him choke his life away and he can't retreat, can't tell them to leave, because they have to hold this hill, a worthless stretch of land nobody will even remember. It's then that he doesn't see a pearl necklace around her neck but a chain of dogtags, the names stirred together until he can no longer remember who was who, the ones who lived from the ones who died. He takes her home early and sits up all night, staring out the window and into the street lamps and the darkness beyond.

Holding down a job is nearly impossible and he drifts from one to the next. He could have stayed in the military, perhaps should have since it's all he knows now, but he had to get away, instinctively knowing somehow that another month, even a week longer, and he would have forfeited his sanity.

He visits the graves, all of them, every man whose tags he tore from their necks, the ones who died screaming, calling for loved ones, and clutching crosses, crucifixes, Stars of David, or photographs, and those who died quickly, put out like a candle in a breath of wind, a slip on a landmine, a bullet to the head, and silence. Eventually he even visits the wounded, Hansen in the veteran's hospital with a plate in his head and a brain injury that will never heal, Saunders with a stiff leg that will never straighten. He looks them in the eye, without blinking, searching for hatred and finding none. It leaves him hollow as if their bitterness would have been more bearable, some punishment, as if drinking from the wormwood cup and swallowing the gall would be more tolerable than to have it sitting in front of his lips at all times.

Once a week, every Saturday evening, he calls the hospital, a ritual like the prayers he murmured as a child, the ones he's forgotten. He tries to pray at first, but all he can remember is _Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray_ and snatches of the Rosary, broken fragments echoing as he hears D'Angelo praying over Hansen and watches the cross drawn over his chest.

At first the phone calls are waiting for D'Angelo to die, for the moment when they'll ship his body home and he'll do another duty, standing beside the grave like the commander he used to be as the casket lowers into the earth. Slowly he turns to wondering, daring to hope as the tired voice on the end of the line brightens and tells him that the soldier is getting stronger, that he seems to be beating the infection and the odds. And finally there's the day when he calls and the nurse tells him, smile brushing the words, that D'Angelo is going to live. It's one soldier, a single face among all the rest. He's lost countless others like him, kids just past eighteen, husbands and fathers of four, battle-scarred veterans only a few days away from going home. He wouldn't even have bet a dime on D'Angelo's chances of surviving the war the day he first saw him. It's a frail victory but he can't explain why it doesn't ease the pain.

There's no contact with the others after that. He keeps his distance from veteran's hospitals and the occasional letters and wedding invitations. He takes a job and holds onto it by his fingernails, and he's surviving, he thinks, day by day but surviving.

It's been a year and a half since the war and he's walking down the street when he bumps into someone and mumbles an apology without looking up until he hears the quiet "Captain?". He's wearing a plaid shirt and brown pants, and his hair has grown beyond the shorter cut of soldiers, wind-tousled without a helmet. He's thinner than he was, with the look of a man who's had a slow and hard recovery. But the eyes are the same, dark and fathoms deep.

"Pete." The name tastes of muddy earth and constant rain, K-rations and the metallic taste of fear in his mouth, memories he's tried to bury. D'Angelo smiles widely and reaches an arm around the woman at his side, pretty with a thick Italian accent and a gold band on the hand resting over the slight swell beneath her clothes.

The envy tastes bitter in his mouth and he hates himself for it. D'Angelo paid for his happiness in far too much blood to not deserve it. They say little to each other beyond a few words and his forced congratulations, and he hurries away as soon as he can, unable to keep looking into his eyes lest all the memories of battlefields and dying men come flooding back and swallow him whole.

There's a reunion later on and they all but force him to come. In the end he finally gives in and stays on the outskirts. D'Angelo is there, of course, with his wife and the baby, a tiny thing that all the others make a fuss over and all he can see is the Italian children in the farmhouses, twisted little forms shot down by German soldiers because they couldn't find the partisans in this house or there wasn't the escaped American prisoner in the next. He takes her in his arms when D'Angelo hands her to him and the baby's wide and deep set eyes look into his, look deep into his soul and strip it bare. She smells of warm milk and talcum powder and innocence and he wants to rupture wide open, to scream as he never did all those other times, to recoil from life as he once did from death before lying in a trench beside the dying or digging a grave with his bare hands became a way of life. The others talk and share some memories, some even weeping as he stands stoic, eyes dry and jaw clenched.

It takes him a few years to cry. Time marches on and the men he served with find a patch of life that hasn't been entirely destroyed and rebuild it brick by brick. There's jobs and plans, dreams and buying their own homes, wives and children. Gibson heads to school on a GI bill, Lucavich looks after Hansen, and D'Angelo's little girl takes her first ballet lesson. There's skinned knees and birthday candles, photographs and ABCs, and a hundred more things that have become their worlds as his remains still, coping and not moving beyond, still water with sharks lurking beneath.

When he does cry it's on a summer day, in the car, and it's over a sentimental tune he once loved, a record he hasn't thought of in years, an oldie and never a hit, a jagged fragment of when he was young the day before Salerno, before he killed a man, before he saw a man die, before orders and commands, mud and blood, discharge papers and whatever he is now. He doesn't even like the tune anymore, he's so changed, but he remembers the words, some part of him retaining them after this time as if they were important. The first sound comes out as laughter, a watery, hysterical laugh that borders on a sob as the dam bursts.

And when he finally starts crying he doesn't stop for a long time.


	4. Chapter 4

_"He left the States 31 months ago. He was wounded in his first campaign. He has had tropical diseases. He half-sleeps at night and gouges Japs out of holes all day. Two-thirds of his company has been killed or wounded. He will return to attack this morning. How much can a human being endure?"-Tom Lea, 1945 correspondent and artist of "Marines Call It That 2,000 Yard Stare", referring to the soldier who he painted._

You never forget your commanding officer.

It's strange in a way, I suppose, because the mind dims with age, names and battles fade away, and most of us try to put the war behind us. But _he_ stays in your memory, the man who held the power over life and death, the one you followed into purgatory. Mine was a captain. Captain Benedict. He was young, then, younger than Lt. Kimbro, Sgt. McKenna, or half of the men beneath him, and like me, he'd never seen a day of combat before we landed at Salerno. He was scared stiff at first, we all could see it in his eyes, but he made it through San Pietro, and after that there wasn't a man in the squad who wouldn't follow him across Italy.

In all honesty, I never truly liked Captain Benedict. Admired and respected him, yes. But he was a difficult man to know, and sometimes there was a hardness in him that turned my blood cold, like the time he didn't help that tailor who the tanks gunned down, or the German soldier holding the grenade on the Italian girl. D'Angelo never got over watching that girl blown up when the Captain shot the German, and for weeks afterwards he'd start screaming in his sleep.

D'Angelo was the hardest, I think. He was wild and always gambling but we all liked him, and when he took a grenade saving Lt. Kimbro we were set to storm Berlin itself to get him back if we had to. But the Captain wouldn't even let us try, saying that it was better to lose one man than all of us. I think the lieutenant and I hated him then, because he wrote D'Angelo off too easily, like it didn't matter at all.

We went him after him against orders, and I think we'd known we could have been court-martialed for it. We found D'Angelo lying on a pile of filthy straw in a cell, and brought him back, but the infection was already deep in the shrapnel wounds and after a few days the doctor wanted to amputate the arm and leg to save his life. I remember looking up at Captain Benedict, and my stomach twisted, lurching against my throat. There was no anger or bitterness on his face, no rage or even the faintest whisper of worry. His face was blank, like a dead man walking, a horrible, empty stare as if he'd looked into the face of death itself. That look didn't go away until D'Angelo started responding to the penicillin, and the doctor changed his mind, but by then, I'd already realized what it meant, because I'd felt it myself, that once, when I watched men die.

Every soldier finds a way to deal with the war. Some get angry, killing the enemy as if they have a personal vendetta against them, hating to keep themselves going. Others keep their eyes on home and going back, surviving because they know it will mean seeing their families again. And some don't cope at all, going deep inside themselves and breaking away from the world, and losing themselves in the effort. And that's what happened to the Captain. But I couldn't say anything because Captain Benedict was my commanding officer, the leader, and a leader has to stay strong to keep his men from falling apart. I couldn't ruin that, not when it was keeping us alive.

D'Angelo was wounded again right at the end of the war, the last battle our squad fought in, only this time I expected the look before I saw it, even if I didn't know it was the last time I'd see it in the war. It was a bad wound, even I knew that, and he was bleeding out despite our hands clamping the artery. I remember calling to the Captain, my voice strange to my own ears, high-pitched and ringing, and his eyes snapped in a hard blink, coming to a focus on us. For one terrible moment I thought he wasn't going to order us back, that he'd make us hold a worthless stretch of land and a shelled-out farmhouse, and let D'Angelo bleed his life away into the dirt. But he gave the order and even clamped down on the wound while we carried him between us, running as fast as we dared in the direction of the field hospital.

D'Angelo was always the sensitive one of all of us. No one would think it to look at him, not with the roughness about him or the calm way he'd throw a grenade without even blinking. But he was soft inside, gentle in a way few of us still were, as if the war hadn't been able to carve his heart out. Call it a weakness, or even a flaw, but he's still the strongest person I've known, despite his caring, and while everyone's eyes said that he wouldn't live, I knew differently. If anyone could survive an ounce of lead against their heart and an unimaginable loss of blood, it was him. So while Conley prayed, and the wounded kept coming in, I held onto the faith I had in him. I owed D'Angelo that much, after that time in the snow when we were separated from the rest of the squad and I would have died of exhaustion and exposure if he hadn't gotten me back by himself.

He fought hard for life through fever, but even when no more orders came for us he didn't start to recover. There was no look on the Captain's face this time and through it all Captain Benedict never cracked once.

The war ended just a little while after that. Conley stayed at the hospital, and I went back as all the rest who could travel did, home to my parents and the home I'd grown up in. Conley called me when D'Angelo took a turn for the better, and again when the doctor finally said he'd live. He'd called the Captain, too, but he'd already known. Conley thought he must have been calling every day to check.

The rest of us kept in touch but I didn't see the Captain again until our reunion. He stayed on the outskirts for the most part, and said only a handful of words to anyone. D'Angelo was there, of course, with the nurse he'd married as soon as he was on his feet, and their baby girl, and the Captain held her when he gave her to him, eyes clouding in a fainter copy of that look I remembered from before. He left early, and none of us heard from him after that, but I'd assumed he'd moved on as we'd all tried to do, even as I knew, deep down inside, that there was no moving on for Captain Benedict.

So, I guess it was sadness I felt, more than shock or anything else, when I got the phone call from D'Angelo, passing on what he'd heard from Lucavich. Most of us had married and had kids by now, and all of us had a steady job. The Captain had drifted from job to job and didn't so much as have a girlfriend. He lived in a small apartment, spending most of his time off work alone and indoors. He'd slit his wrists over the bathtub, and somehow the landlady, checking on him, chose that moment to come. He'd live, but he was in the hospital, on suicide watch.

Pete met me outside the hospital. He's already seen him, and called most of the others, but he can't stay because his wife is back home and another baby is on the way, any day now. He always wanted a large family, like he grew up with, and even his sadness over the Captain can't dim the happiness in his eyes or the softness in his voice when he talks about his wife, their daughter, or the unborn child.

It's ironic somehow that D'Angelo, the one with the bleeding heart, picked up the pieces and moved on better than the rest of us, and the Captain, hard and by the book, is still somewhere in the war. No one knows if he'll get better, if he'll ever leave the war and come home in his mind. My footsteps echo in the halls as I walk toward his room, and I swallow the sick taste in my throat before I enter.

The Captain looks older, far more than six years should allow, with gray threads at his temples, and a worn look on his face. I sit down across from his bed in a hard-backed chair, the soles of my feet scuffing with a painfully loud sound in the quiet. His hands rest on his stomach, wrists bandaged, and he's thin and frail-looking, as if six years have drained the heart right out of him.

"Sir?"

His eyes shift to me, and for only a moment they clear, and I swear he looks straight at me. "Gibson." His voice is quiet, faint. "Can you hear them screaming? All those voices crying out and the English and German all tangled together?"

"No, sir." My chest tightens, and, help me, aches for him, for strong Captain Benedict and all the casualties of the war who came home in coffins of their mind instead of a wooden box. We're out of the army and he's no longer in charge, but I don't feel permitted to provide words of comfort, only the quietly respectful responses I once gave.

"Pete D'Angelo." Captain Benedict says, suddenly, the middle of a sentence without the beginning. His eyes stare down at the twitching hands as if not recognizing them as his own. "Did I let him die?"

"No, sir." I swallow the lump in my throat, forcing the words to remain steady, as I see the light of explosions against the darkened sky, feel the slickness of D'Angelo's blood between my fingers, and see the Captain's face above me, stiff and seemingly uncaring as the anger surges in me, the hatred for an officer who I'd thought would let another man die. "You ordered us back and we got him to the field hospital on time."

He squints, staring into the wall behind me as if looking through it, eyes searching all of Italy. "And the tailor..?"

"He was killed, sir. By a Panzer." My voice wavers despite my efforts, but the Captain's eyes don't flicker.

"I can't remember the tailor's name." His voice is hollow, almost detached. "I should...I shouldn't forget the name of a man I let... Do you know what it was?" My fingers dig into the chair, my palm hard against the wood.

"No, sir." My words are quiet but heavy, weighed with sadness and the realization that I can't recall it either, sadness for a war and a man still fighting it, and all of us crawling inch through painful inch across a country we'd never even seen. I want to help him but I don't know how, because how can you make someone forget how they held the power over life and death in their hands? He did all he could, what he thought was best, and it wasn't enough for all of us. But he's only human, and men break like glass.

He's still watching me, and the words tumble out even as I try to grasp the name, the image of the face he'll never forget, and fail.

"I don't remember."


	5. Chapter 5

_"The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst."-Henry Fosdick_

I don't how, but the instant the phone rang I knew. He didn't say much, only a few words, but it didn't matter. I'd seen too much death to cry, and I wouldn't have cried over him anyway. We were never close, not in the sense of friendship, only in the sense of sleeping back to back in foxholes, or holding down on wounds to keep the lifeblood inside. And besides, I think we'd all been expecting it for a long time now. Two attempts, so I'd suspected suicide. It wasn't. It was a natural death, even for a man so young in terms of years and so aged in his soul; a sudden aneurysm and nothing more. But nothing, after all, was ordinary about Captain Benedict.

"We should go." Caressa said quietly. "To the funeral."

I didn't want to. Linda had a birthday coming up and Bobby wanted help with his homework, but I pulled out a dark suit and shrugged into it slowly, like a man headed for the gallows. Even after all these years I'm still uncomfortable in a suit. It's too tight, and much too clean, strange and foreign, like a piece of my life before the war tucked away and forgotten. I think about the war as I drive, memories and fragments of time, and I realize how ironic it is to be going to the funeral of a man who spent every day since the war living in the last few months of it, and I remember nothing of those last days at all. It's to be expected, the doctors told me, for a man who nearly dies to lose track of time. I remember only the impact of the bullet, the feel of metal clipping the edge of my heart, and then nothing until Caressa.

I owe her my life. Everyone else had long given up on my chances, and she stayed with me, night and day, sitting, talking, holding my hand. A girl I'd never met but felt I'd known forever. My healing was slow, painful months of flesh and muscle knitting back together, followed by nearly a year of weakness as I blinked back to life one flicker at a time. I fell in love with Caressa, married her before I was on my feet, and brought her home as soon as I could travel. She taught me strength and endurance. I taught her English and the ways of America. Six months later, on a day I thought I couldn't go any longer, she took my hand and laid it against her stomach, tears shining in her eyes and the words in Italian, more natural and beautiful than the limits of English. That was Linda, dark eyes and flailing little arms and legs, a tiny bundle placed in my hands like the final pieces of a broken life pasted back together. My eyes and Caressa's strength in a child we'd created together out of the ashes of a war that had stolen most my health and all of her family.

I never looked back again. I healed as Linda grew, and by the time Bobby came along the war was nightmares I'd hidden away in the back of my mind, never forgotten but dusty. Ten years, and I thought I'd put most of it behind me. Conley meets me at the door, face more lined, hair grayer, but that same fortitude that carried us through the war, a warm familiarity like the click of his typewriter or the guitar I dragged through all but the last months until it broke. He reaches out and pulls me into a hug and I feel my arms come around him, no slap on the back, no joviality, just a comfort, a reassurance, a remembrance of days past when we didn't know if we'd live to see tomorrow. He takes Caressa's hand in both of his, then touches Linda's cheek and tousles Bobby's hair, and I see the memories in his gaze, of the little Italian kids with unwashed faces and yearning eyes, of the chocolate and time we spent with them, and of finding others lying dead beneath the rubble of their villages.

The others are here, of course: Mac, looking uncomfortable and out of place, fingers fumbling with a tie his wife attempts to straighten, and Gibson, still tow-headed but matured, aged from the frightened boy bent over the radio in the midst of bombings. Lucavich, guiding Hansen to his seat, bending over to tie the shoes of a man once as capable as any of us and now very much like those children we played with between the battles. Saunders, leaning heavily on a cane, with his family at his other arm, and the rest, all here to remember a man we knew, truly knew, for less than five years.

Captain Benedict never married. Never had any children. He lived alone, and died alone, maintaining a distance between his men and the burden of command that no one could cross, not even the other officers. But he kept most of us alive, took a mismatched company of men from diverse backgrounds and turned us into soldiers, grew with us into our leader. We would have followed him into the jaws of hell itself..did a time or two, and back.

And he saved my life. Not in the way Caressa did, with gentle touches and coaxing words, but with a short command, a retreat when he should have stayed and held that ground, a moment when he chose my life over a battle. There were many things the Captain and I never saw eye to eye on. There were even times I hated the man, like when he left the tailor to die instead of risk the other men, or the girl who still haunts my dreams. He lacked Conley's warmth, or Gibson's youth, or Frank's heart. But he was my Captain, our Captain, and he was the reason I'm here today.

I stare at the coffin for a long moment, as Caressa's hand slips into mind, and I remember the taste of blood and the scent of earth tainted by explosions, followed by burning pain. And I see the Captain, through a crimson and grey haze, bending over me, fingers tightening on the wound, holding in my life.

And for only a second, my chest clenches in the place of the long-healed and faded scar.


End file.
